Afraid of the Dark - James Grippando [18]
“What did you do?”
“I headed for Somalia to hide with my father.”
“The terrorist recruiter?”
“At the time, I didn’t know he was involved with all of that. He was just my father, and I needed help.”
“Did you stay with him?”
“For about a week. He got me a fake passport to turn me into Khaled al-Jawar, which is the name you knew me by.”
“Was that a real person or a made-up name?”
“I have no idea, and I was so scared that I didn’t care. This was at the height of the Ethiopian invasion. I could hear the gunfighting in the city, especially after dark. Then one night the troops busted down the door to my father’s apartment, and they took me away. You know the rest of the story. It was exactly what you told the judge in Washington. The Ethiopians forced me to confess that I was sheltering al-Qaeda operatives, and then they handed me over to the CIA.”
“Probably for some amount of bounty money,” said Neil.
“I’m sure,” said Jamal. “Next thing I knew, I was on my way to Gitmo.”
“And you didn’t bother telling them who you really were.”
“Well, duh. I would have been sent to Miami on murder charges. I figured that if I kept quiet—if I could play the part of a Somali peasant named Khaled al-Jawar—the Americans would have to release me sooner or later.”
“So no one at Gitmo ever accused you of being Jamal Wakefield?”
“Nope.”
Jack looked at Neil. “They must have known. Fingerprints or something.”
Jamal glared, as if he resented having to repeat himself: “They never said anything about it,” said Jamal, his voice taking on an edge.
Jack said, “Obviously the interrogators in Prague knew your true identity, right?”
“Oh, they knew everything about me there. And they used it, too.”
“In what way?”
“Threats, mainly.”
“They threatened you?”
“All the time. It started mostly with threats against my mother—the things they were going to enjoy doing to her if I refused to talk about Project Round Up.”
“Any other threats?”
“Yeah. Including one that they kept.”
“Tell me.”
Jamal’s expression turned very serious. “They said if I didn’t give them the information they wanted, they would kill McKenna.”
His words hung in the air, as if her violent death had taken a whole new turn.
There was a knock on the door, and the door opened.
“Showtime,” the guard said.
Jamal’s arraignment was scheduled for eleven A.M., and there was just enough time to get the prisoner downstairs for a court “appearance” via closed-circuit television from the jailhouse.
“So,” asked Neil, “does this mean I get to keep my ponytail?”
Jack had almost forgotten that Neil had bet his precious locks that Jack would stay on the case after hearing Jamal’s story. But it didn’t take the smartest lawyer in the world to see the problems in Jamal’s case—even if he was telling the truth.
“For now,” he said. “But keep your scissors handy.”
Chapter Nine
It was 11:04 P.M. when Jack finally got home from the office. When it came to pro bono cases, the well-established rule that “no good deed goes unpunished” seemed to have an exponential ripple effect, as if every hour spent working for free put you three hours behind on billable files. He walked through his front door and plopped on the couch just in time for the tail end of the lead story on the late local news.
“Wakefield was denied bail,” said the anchorwoman. “A trial date has not yet been set.”
Trial. The very thought made Jack shudder. Neil had offered to pay him out of the Freedom Institute’s operating budget, but Jack knew how that would play out. Jack would present a bill, and Neil would wax on about all the schoolchildren who would have to go without textbooks because there was no money to sue the mayor for paying six-figure salaries to his chauffeur, his barber, and a nineteen-year-old waitress at Hooters who was also his “secretary.”
Jack switched off the TV, changed into jogging shorts and a T-shirt